When to post on social media: find your time slots without trusting averages

Articles promising “the best time to post” are tempting. The problem: they average millions of accounts that look nothing like yours. Your audience has its own habits, and that’s what you need to watch.

Why averages mislead

• An audience of professionals isn’t online at the same hours as an audience of students.
• An audience spread across several time zones has no shared “evening”.
• Each network’s algorithm changes: what held last year may not hold today.

A four-step method

1. Start from what you know. When do your customers write to you? What time do messages and comments arrive? Your inbox is already a presence indicator.
2. Pick two or three slots to test, not ten. For example: early morning, lunch break, end of the day.
3. Post the same type of content in each slot for three to four weeks. Comparing different content proves nothing.
4. Compare, keep, repeat. Keep the slot that works best, replace the weakest with a new candidate.

What matters as much as the time

• Consistency. An audience gets used to finding you at a given moment.
• Being around after you post. The first replies to a post count: if you publish when you’re there to answer, the conversation starts.
• Time zone. Check your calendar’s before you schedule.

Schedule, so you publish at the right time rather than when you happen to be free

That’s the real point of a publishing calendar: you prepare posts when you have time, and they go out when your audience is there. In Postbiz you see the whole week, network by network, before anything goes out. See scheduling.